Ah, time for one of my favorite princesses and perhaps the most common target of, for lack of a better term, haters. As a film, Cinderella is a surprisingly realistic portrayal of abuse and how abuse survivors cope, as well as an optimistic fairytale.
As a disclaimer, there is room for legitimate criticism of Cinderella and
this is not going to invalidate any valid criticism of her film, but
rather offer a different perspective on her film and specifically on Cinderella as a character.
Cinderella is too girlish! Cinderella waits for a man to save her! Or so the criticisms go. As for the latter, that’s blatantly not true according to the story, and as for the former, well… I’ll quote part of what I said in my Snow White analysis here, adapted for Cinderella:
If you… devalue her based on the strong presence of her
traditionally feminine traits while ignoring her very real and very
present strength[s], perhaps you should be reexamining your own sexism.
As for Cinderella herself, her defining traits are not that she cooks and cleans–she sings as she does so, but she also doesn’t voluntarily do any of it, unlike Snow White. She does however do almost everything out of compassion both for others and for herself. Why compassion is seen as a feminine trait is honestly another discussion all together and it’s disturbing that this does appear to be a common assumption. Compassion is good. The answer isn’t to not emphasize compassion in a female character (who, by nature of existing in a fairy tale for children, is going to be a relatively simple character), but rather emphasize it for male characters as well. Cinderella (1950) does also play with gender roles several times, notably with Lady Tremaine (the wicked stepmother) and with the Grand Duke.
This film goes out of its way to highlight Cinderella’s compassion as the trait that is most beautiful about her, though it’s certainly a valid criticism that the stepsisters are noted to be “awkward” (the film never uses the word “ugly”) and Lady Tremaine is noted to be jealous of Cinderella’s beauty–but also her charm, aka her personality.
It’s noted that Cinderella’s father married Lady Tremaine only because he felt his daughter “needed a mother’s care.” In other words, the man’s own insecurity and belief that he wasn’t enough led to him marrying the woman who would later abuse Cinderella. In other words, because he didn’t think he could be enough of a feminine influence on her, she wound up being abused. Damn you sensitive masculinity.
But it’s also notable that the father is noted to love his child very much, and that compassion is clearly very important to Cinderella’s journey. Under her father’s care, the chateau she grows up in is noted to be beautiful, but once he dies Lady Tremaine “squanders” the fortune on her daughter’s “vain and selfish” interests, letting the chateau fall into disrepair. The chateau can be seen as symbolic of Cinderella herself in some ways, but also of Lady Tremaine–the more energy and time she spends on her selfish jealousy, the more she doesn’t realize that her inner beauty is falling into disrepair.
Cinderella’s got a backbone. The girl is not a pushover even when she’s being ordered around. Starting from her very first proper scene, wherein she teases the birds for waking her up and tries to stay asleep. But she can’t, because she’s got to face the world, which is not as kind to her. She grouses at the clock, complaining that “even he orders me around.“ When Anastasia and Drizella accuse her of deliberately putting a mouse in her cup, she starts the conversation with her stepmother with “oh please, you don’t think that I–” She tells them “I’m still a member of the family.” She is smart. She is polite to her abusers, yes (often, unfortunately, that’s realistic and a survival strategy) and even kind to Lucifer, the privileged fat cat (and the best character). And yet Cinderella doesn’t take Lucifer’s bullshit, sarcastically telling him “I’m sorry if Your Highness objects to an early breakfast.” She has spunk.
However, Cinderella is also naive and prone to losing herself in dreams. Dreams are coded as positive in Cinderella, but also as something that doesn’t suffice as a long-term solution. Instead, dreams are tools that help you escape. For example, the Fairy Godmother’s illusion is basically a waking dream that enables her to reach her escape. But the Fairy Godmother also warns her the dream comes with a time limit, and she needs to pay heed to it (and almost doesn’t): “But like all dreams, it can’t last forever.” The next morning, Cinderella again loses herself to her daydreams, humming and singing and so lost in her dreams that she doesn’t hear her animal friends trying to warn her that Lady Tremaine is about to lock her in the tower. Which she does.
Yet without dreams, Cinderella could not have survived the years leading up to her dream becoming a reality for a few hours. As she directly states, while Lady Tremaine can take almost everything from her, no one can order her to stop dreaming. While Cinderella is trapped in an abusive situation, she desperately wants to leave, and she believes she will escape some day. A dream, for Cinderella, is escapism, because she can at least be free from something the film itself directly calls “abuse” and “humiliation.” Dreams are not silly; speaking as an abuse survivor myself, sometimes that’s all you have. In her song “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” she sings:
In dreams you will lose your heartache
Whatever you wish for you keep
Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through
No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
The dream that you wish will come true.
Is it simplified? Sure. But that’s a beautiful message to give kids suffering. And given the dual coding of dreams as being something you cannot lose yourself in either, it gives a practical message of acting on your dreams as well.
Cinderella’s compassion is primarily shown through her treatment of the pesky animals, the ones that disgust her stepsisters (like mostly mice, but also birds and Bruno, the dog whom Cinderella warns the stepmother wants to kick out). But she encourages the mice to be smart and Bruno to learn to like cats (aka Lucifer) if only for practical reasons (because they’ll throw him out otherwise). I think this reveals a good deal of Cinderella’s mindset: that she does what they want her to do because she wants to survive. She wants a warm bed and food, and running away all on her own would ensure she’d lose that. Abuse victims do genuinely weigh their options like this, and choosing to stay (especially as a dependent, like Cinderella is) is not something that should be condemned.
The moment Cinderella hears that a mouse (GusGus) is in the rat trap, she stops what she’s doing and rushes down the stairs. In other words, while she can’t yet escape, she’ll be damned if she’ll let someone else suffer abuse in a trap they can’t leave. Not only that, but GusGus is terrified and Cinderella notes as such, and asks for someone who better understands (Jack) to talk to him, and even though GusGus is aggressive at first, Jack’s insistence that they like him and Cinderella likes him coaxes him out of the cage. In other words, compassion and kindness enable him to make a courageous choice and leave the cage.
GusGus is the opposite of Cinderella in some ways: he directly wants to challenge Lucifer until Jack begs him not to. He wants to fight, but practically speaking, it’s just stupid for a mouse to go up against a cat, and Cinderella too lacks the means to go up against her stepfamily. It’s a realistic portray of abuse. GusGus also repeatedly makes naive choices, but in contrast to Cinderella, he tends to be more active (taking risks that aren’t exactly the wisest). For example he gets attacked by the more powerful chickens in a quest for food and they steal his food (it’s foreshadowing to the later scene where the stepsisters will tear Cinderella’s dress from her), but Cinderella intervenes and she gives a downtrodden mouse some food.
Like Snow White, Cinderella’s kindness is rewarded, in that the mice and birds are genuine friends to her (it’s a kids movie don’t take it too literally). They help her make her bed, shower, etc. in the morning, and they then make her dress for her when she doesn’t have time to do it herself. And again, there is a realistic portrayal of abuse in that the stepmother dangles a false hope/dream in front of Cinderella: finish all your chores and get something nice to wear, and you can come–but she fully intends to never let Cinderella come by giving her extra chores.
Despite being a fairytale, in Cinderella, compassion is not always rewarded by things working out. The stepsisters are not just jealous of Cinderella’s looks and her own compassion, but the compassion given to her. They don’t want the beads or the sash, but Lady Tremaine manipulates them into tearing them from Cinderella. Again, it’s realistic to abuse, because parents will often mobilize and manipulate other children to target one.
This is Cinderella’s nadir, in which she sobs, “It’s no use. No use at all. I can’t believe. Not anymore. There’s nothing left to believe in. Nothing,” That’s pretty dark for a kid’s movie, but honestly… don’t we all know that feeling? I certainly do. Cinderella’s arc is about learning to be courageous and take steps in that courage, and this is the moment all of it deserts her, because the one thing she has that connects her to others–compassion–appears to have all been for naught.
What gives Cinderella the push of courage she needs to leave the chateau? The compassion of the fairy godmother. And the fairy godmother makes the ordinary things, the despised things like mice and Bruno (an old dog at risk of being thrown out) into magical things, again reinforcing the theme that the ordinary can be extraordinary, and that the real magic is in the compassion and love she shares with her friends (who are animals because it’s a kid’s fantasy movie). In the end, though the dress they made for her was destroyed, she still couldn’t get to the ball without her friends.
So Cinderella is off to the ball, and that’s when she will meet the prince–who is having to deal with his own issues. The Grand Duke is not nearly so abusively coded as Lady Tremaine, but he is kind of unreasonable and threatening towards his vizier. He also plays with gender roles in that he is the father begging his son to marry and make babies because he wants to hear the little feet of his grandchild. He literally dreams about it, and again shows the potential danger of becoming too attached to dreams in that he’s not very nice and is pretty controlling in his wishes to make dreams happen (aka, there’s not a ton of compassion). That being said he’s coded comically and does want his son to genuinely fall in love. Also of note: usually the nagging parent desperate for grandkids in fiction is a mother, not a father.
At the ball, the Prince’s sees Cinderella wandering around, lost and out of place, and goes to comfort her. His compassion leads him to her.
They sing a song together, and, well, to quote this amazing article about Snow White:
they share a song together, which is Disney/musical theatre code switching for “romantic/sexual love.” Generally speaking, the big waltz that Disney’s romantic duos share at the end of the movie is their act of sexual consummation—sex without sex on Disney terms
Again, it is not sexual. It just conveys the same emotional meaning for the characters as sex would in a romcom. It’s a fairytale for kids so of course they fell in love in a few hours–that isn’t meant to be a recipe for real life love advice. She also doesn’t know he is the prince and says as much when she leaves, telling him “I haven’t even met the prince yet!” as an excuse to run. In other words, contrary to the common narrative that she went out looking for a man to save her, she did not. She went out looking to have a good time and happened to find a man.
The song they sing is “So This is Love” and includes the lyrics “My heart has wings/and I can fly.” Because Cinderella–she’s free now. And throughout the rest of the film, she is free. The guards try to stop her as she flees under the time restriction but she makes it through the palace’s gates. No one and nothing–not the royal guards, not the chateau she grew up in, not the cruelty of her stepmother and stepsisters–can hold her back now. Even though she does go back to the chateau as many abuse victims do, her compassion has enabled her to make connections that will have set her free, and she will run to physical freedom soon enough.
Her stepmother realizes it too: once Cinderella hears the man she was dancing with was the prince, she drops the trays (symbolic of her servanthood, as she’s repeatedly shown carrying those trays) in shock, and as Anastasia and Drizella threw clothes and orders at her to help them get dress, she dreamily shoves them back into their arms and goes to get dressed herself instead.
When the stepmother locks her in the room, it’s the mice who face off with Lucifer, but this time not for mere food, but for their friend, and they free her. The mice dive straight into the teacups to get the key from Lady Tremaine, which is also a callback to an earlier scene in which GusGus was trapped in a teacup to hide from Lucifer.
The man is also about to give up and is distraught when Cinderella is finally freed but Lady Tremaine smashes the slipper. But Cinderella pulls out another slipper, again showing herself capable of helping other people scared of people in power over them. Her compassion saves her, and saves others around her. When Cinderella gets married the mice and old horse and Bruno, who all played a role in freeing her from Lady Tremaine and also escorted her to the ball, are celebrating with her. Because Cinderella’s story is meant to give hope to the people in her story, and to the audience.
A dream cannot save you, but it can give you a chance to escape by giving you the hope you need. Compassion and courage is what will save you. I think that’s a beautiful message within Cinderella.
Thanks for reading! Up next, Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty–which was one of my favorite movies as a kid. For previous entries in this series, see here:
hamliet 